Forum Discussion
Files On-Demand for macOS QA
Why does the "new and improved" OneDrive client refuse to download files even after you select "Always Keep on this Device?" On my M1 MacMini, I've been able to force this to work, although it took several days. On my Intel MacBook Pro, however, it simply will not download folders or files unless you click on each and every file, one by one by one...
It simply doesn't work consistently or sometimes at all. This is a complete failure, I still can't believe it. Ankita Kirti
- Hey Michael,
How did you get this to work in the M1 Mac? I am still looking for a solution to have all the files populated in my root folder (not the cache folder).
Pernille-Eskebo tech people
I have set my folders to 'Always available' and I have run the "ls -alR ~/OneDrive" command in Terminal.
Now all files show the always available icon AND the cloud icon. When I try ti quick view a file's contents (by pressing the space bar after selecting the file in finder), I only see a small version of the file or an icon.
The cloud icon disappears after I have fully opened the file once with the appropriate app. After that, quick view works as per normal as well.
The MS people in the community (not the tech community) assure me that I can disregard the cloud icon, which signals that the file is only available online. It means, according to them, that the file in the root folder is only an empty placeholder BUT the complete file is available in the hidden cache folder!
How do I force OneDrive to have a full version of ALL my files in the root folder?? The cloud icon staying there always is confusing and seems to be a bug :
Why are all my files redownloading with this update? Why are my always-available files displaying a "not downloaded" icon?
Let me first set you at ease: your files aren't actually redownloading. What you are seeing is a bit of an optical illusion.
When your OneDrive instance is upgraded to the new Files On-Demand, macOS creates a new folder for your OneDrive files and we move your old folder into our cache location. We do it this way for many reasons, but two of the most important are that we can preserve your settings around which files are always available, and we can prevent the sync client from performing a costly reindex of all of your content.
As your files are brought into our cache, we tell the macOS File Provider platform about them. That causes the operating system to create the files in the new OneDrive folder that you will actually use. As part of telling the File Provider platform about your files, we include metadata about them, so that the operating system knows how big they are, what icons to show, and so forth.
Unfortunately, the current implementation of File Provider does not allow us to tell the operating system that we already have the file's contents available – so they appear to be online-only, even though their contents are safe in our cache, ready for the first time you access them. The best that we can do is tell the system to show the always available icon (the checkmark), but we can't tell the system to hide the "not downloaded" icon. The "not downloaded" icon is shown automatically by the File Provider system when the file is dataless in the sync root, and there's no current way for OneDrive to override this. Please know that we are actively investigating ways to address this, as we understand that it is a top source (if not the top source) of user confusion with this update.
The key thing to remember here is that if you double-click the files that we already have in our cache (files that you pinned when you selected “Always Keep On This Device” and anything you had downloaded before we did the upgrade), they will be retrieved and opened as expected, without any network traffic. This will work even if OneDrive isn't running, is paused, and so forth.
Michael_Dufranne: I read what you are saying but I am also telling you (and so are many others) that it does not describe what is actually happening. The files are not on my device, even after requesting that they be kept on. They are not indexed by spotlight, because I've checked. They are not captured by other spotlight-dependent applications, like Alfred. If I open them, they download, but if I edit them, I invariably get an error in the program they are opened in (for example, a pdf in Preview or a doc in Word) that the file has been changed by an external application and has to be reloaded. Then, when it's reloaded, all previous changes are gone. It's maddening.
- I'm having the exact same issue, and only with the OneDrive content. I've rebuilt Spotlight index several times, still not finding my supposedly downloaded files in Spotlight nor Alfred, not even folders… OneDrive is indeed maddening, and an awful ressource hog.
This version was NOT ready for prime time!
